FUTURE TENSE

A deep dive into the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence.

The book’s early chapters cover AI’s history—going back to ideas from ancient China, Egypt, and Greece—providing readers with a thorough foundation that summarizes various technological developments, each more advanced than the next. This section is best suited to research papers, as the language tends toward the dense and dry. That said, readers will appreciate the text’s impressive clarity in technical explanations and the author’s obvious respect for young readers’ intelligence. The writing becomes remarkably more engaging once the book progresses to modern applications—the good (some medical uses), the bad (surveillance of daily life, deception by bots), and the problems AI can learn to solve. Brockenbrough is particularly good at finding ways to tie its applications to students’ lives through relatable examples. At the same time, she covers the broader international context (for example, she compares the AI race between China and the U.S. to the Cold War space race). The book documents both the diversity of the humans behind the creation of AI and the racial bias that can be baked into the technology through the flawed data it’s trained on. A careful neutrality, an emphasis on the pros and cons of AI itself, clear ethical judgments regarding certain uses (e.g., privacy violations and manipulation of opinions and emotions), factual accuracy, and rigorous documentation all support authorial credibility and make this an important read.

A valuable resource for classrooms, libraries, and forward-looking teens.